Andy Warhol Flowers
3 1/4 x 3 1/4 inchesAndy Warhol Flowers, 1964, 2011
3 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches
Titled and signed "'Andy Warhol, Flowers, 1964' Richard Pettibone 2011" in pen on the overlap.
Provenance
Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
Exhibited
Richard Pettibone, Recent Work, September 10 – October 22, 2011, Castelli, New York
Richard Pettibone is one of the pioneers of Appropriation Art, the practice of quoting, copying or deforming objects or pre-existing works of art, which was developed by numerous artists in the second half of the 20th century.
RICHARD PETTIBONE ANDY WARHOL FLOWERS
Richard Pettibone is one of the pioneers of Appropriation Art, the practice of quoting, copying or deforming objects or pre-existing works of art, which was developed by numerous artists in the second half of the 20th century. In 1964, in Los Angeles, he began painting his emblematic series of miniature replicas or copies of works by his New York contemporaries, true to the scale of reproduction of the images in Art Forum magazine, to which he had access. From Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle wheel, Andy Warhol’s soup cans, Roy Lichtenstein’s works and Jasper Johns’ flags, Pettibone created his own collection and sometimes even associated or linked the artists together in the Combine paintings series for example. Richard Pettibone’s first solo exhibitions were held at the Ferus Gallery in 1965 and at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1969. He has been the subject of significant retrospective exhibitions at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art in 2005 and at the Laguna Art Museum in 2006. His works feature among the collections of numerous prestigious institutions including the MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, as well as the MoCA in Los Angeles.
In Andy Warhol ‘Flowers,’ 1965 (2011), he arranges the tiny square hand-painted in grids of 16 in some casesand 70 in others, to reflect all of the possible ways that the four flowers in the composition can be painted different colors (which vary between red, yellow, blue and white).
Pettibone saw Warhol’s first show, at the Ferus Gallery in 1962. “Many, many of the other artists who saw it really hated it,” he remembers. “They were pounding the tables with anger, screaming, ‘this is not art!’ I told them, this may be the worst art you’ve ever seen, but it’s art. It’s not sports!"
Pettibone has cited the show as one of the main influences on his practice, which in the 1960s included diminutive forgeries of Warhol, but also Marcel Duchamp, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. “When I did the first Warhol imitation, in the late 1960s, I was a young artist. I wanted to be a great painter. What better way to do that than to copy a great painting?”
Warhol and Lichtenstein were generally supportiveand even amused by Pettibone’s reproductions, but other artists—Stella, for instance—are less charmed. “Stella thinks I’m mocking himand he’s right, I am mocking him,” Pettibone said. “But I also greatly admire him. But I have to wonder, if he really thinks that a work of art has no meaning, that it’s just paint on a canvas, then how come his so much more valuable than mine?”
From the outside, Pettibone’s work has changed very little from the 1960s, when he first started appropriating Pop imagery, although he claims that he has become a better craftsman. “Ezra Pound once said that he expected artists to get better as they get older. He called it an increase in fineness. I’m a better artist now than I ever was.”
